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The CIO’s Perfect Storm

Disaster recovery and business continuity can easily preoccupy today’s
CIOs, but this Louisianan is making sure the whirlwind of survival issues
d'esn’t overshadow other key IT needs in higher ed.

Brian Voss, after his first year as
LSU’s
CIO: “If the CIO’s focus
moves almost
exclusively into one
area—the “perfect
storm” issues—
you will start to see
diminishing
focus in other critical areas.”

Brian Voss became CIO at Louisiana State
University in April 2005. Four months later,
in the grip of Hurricane Katrina, he and his
Gulf Coast colleagues experienced one of
the greatest disasters in history. In the wake
of the storm, Voss has been active on the
national scene discussing—in terms of disaster
recovery and business continuity planning
for IT—the lessons of Katrina for CIOs.
But he’s now seeing a different “storm” approaching higher
education IT leaders; one that threatens to alter their
roles and the value IT delivers to their institutions.

In your first year as a CIO, with the additional burdens
brought to you by Katrina, you’ve had to face some harsh
realities about priorities. What are some of the issues
now competing for your attention, and how do you determine
your focus? At this moment in time, CIOs are facing
critical housekeeping and survival issues—disaster recovery
and business continuity planning, IT security and data integrity,
and ERP systems—all very hot topics that we’ve got to
deal with; they’re right in front of us and converged into an
almost “perfect storm” that could easily command all of our
attention for the next several years. But a big concern I have
as a CIO, as my energy g'es into these very survivalist kinds
of things, is that this will draw our focus away from all of the
other issues that we need to face in terms of higher ed IT.

We’re just completing our strategic information technology
plan—our Flagship IT Strategy—and
only two of its 10 recommendations address these survivalist
issues. There are eight other recommendations! They
include building a solid foundation of IT infrastructure, making
significant strides in increasing the accessibility of the
campus community to that infrastructure, developing a
robust and multi-tiered support enterprise, paying attention
to our fiscal planning, developing plentiful resources for research, providing abundant resources to enable faculty
teaching and student learning, supporting the use of IT in
the student living environment, and developing our own advisory
and communication structures to keep everything moving
forward in a sound and collaborative way. All these things
are going to be fighting with the first two for resources. So
I’m very concerned that we are headed into an age in which
CIOs deal only with survival and are not able to focus on the
other broad elements inherent in our portfolios.

What could promote a CIO’s ability to focus more broadly?
It would be helpful if our administrations—our presidents,
chancellors, and provosts—continued to grow their grasp of
the role of IT in the strategic advance of the institution in the
21st century. Having a continuing, heightening relationship
between them and the campus IT leaders will help CIOs to
address the challenges coming down the road and not consume
quite as much focus to do that.

Let me give you an example: the whole database breach
issue. It’s complicated by the fact that at many institutions
the CIO is the lonely voice in the wilderness crying out to
address this threat, and that senior administration will not
fully grasp, until they actually have incidents, what the
impact is. And that’s not to indict all senior administration;
there are many presidents and chancellors and provosts
who certainly are very much in tune—especially once they
have experienced this. CIOs who have presidents who grasp
this issue can encourage those presidents to talk to their
colleagues and get this discussion going beyond the CIO
community. This then allows CIOs to spend more time working
with administration to resolve the problems, and less
time just trying to raise awareness and manage the politics
of the problem within their institutions. In turn, it allows time
and energy for broader focus on other IT topics.

I’m very concerned that we are headed into an age where
CIOs deal only with survival and are not able to focus on the
other broad elements inherent in our portfolios.

Given this whole picture, and what you’ve seen in your
new position in the last year, do you see that the role of
the CIO is changing, or has to change? I actually fear that
the role of the CIO is going to change from one of being a
holistic information technology advocate and a provider of
broad, full-range information technology services, to one very,
very focused on these key and potentially deadly survival
issues. I’m concerned that with this—and the natural course
of events over time, which leads CIOs to pay attention mostly
to what may be considered by faculty, researchers, and
students as administrative computing issues—you’ll start to
see a fracturing of IT on campus.

There’s been a lot of effort in the last couple decades to
build a holistic IT environment. Twenty years ago, you had
separate organizations for administrative computing, academic
computing, and telecommunications. Those areas
have now merged into the CIO’s portfolio. It is successful
where that merger yields efficiencies that improve the
effectiveness of all three. But my concern is, now that
they’re all together, if the CIO’s focus moves almost exclusively
into one area—the “perfect storm” issues—you will
start to see diminishing focus in other critical areas.

If that happens, campuses and institutions may react in an
almost free-market manner. For example, the research organizations,
dissatisfied that their central IT organizations are
overly focused on administrative issues and not paying attention
to IT enablement of research, may set up their own separate
research IT area focused purely on their needs. And
that fracturing will cause more resources to be spent overall.
Then, if one particular part of the community makes the case
for managing its own IT, the institution will put resources
there—because it will fear that putting additional resources
into the central IT organization will result in those resources
getting sucked up into perfect storm issues and the research
need will not be met.

Would I be right to guess that part of the risk, with this
potential fracturing, is losing opportunities for collaboration
and resource sharing? Yes—for collaboration and
leveraging, too: Many of the vendors that sell research computation
gear also sell desktop equipment and administrative
platforms. You don’t want to lose the ability to take advantage
of synergies. For instance, we are growing our storage at
LSU, primarily related to our planned expansion of highperformance
computing cycles. But at the same time, we
need more storage for our university information systems. So,
we were able to put these things together and make decisions
that would allow us to take care of both needs with a
more efficient investment of money than if we did them separately.
I fear that with fracturing in this environment, that synergy
will be lost.

What are some examples of other areas, specifically at
LSU, where you’d like to focus your efforts as a CIO?
One of the things we’re very focused on, because of the
presence of Ed Seidel and the Center for Computation and Technology at LSU, is high-performance
and grid computing to enable the advancement of science.
And the LONI project—the Louisiana Optical Networking
Initiative—g'es beyond what we’re doing
on our own campus. In addition to buying the fiber pathways,
optical gear, and network switches to bring up
LONI as a regional network, we’ve also purchased highperformance
computing resources to distribute to state
institutions so that we can use LONI to form a computational
grid.

LSU is also a member of SURA, the Southeastern Universities Research
Association. SURA has a project called the
SURAgrid that
allows member institutions to put computational
assets or resources into a broader grid
across the SURA community.

Both LONI and the SURAgrid are initiatives
that help advance the collaborative
nature of 21st-century science, and show
how building IT infrastructure can really
enable scientific advances that go beyond
the borders of an individual lab or campus.
And that fits well with our role in the national
infrastructure, in terms of our involvement
with national high-performance networks
such as National LambdaRail.

These types of initiatives, where you are
making real strides, are what you live for,
right? Right. This is why I wanted to be a
CIO. I wanted to be a CIO because I want to
work with all of these things, not just some. I
truly believe that IT can advance an institution
to national prominence. I believe that
when you look at the usual measures of an
institution—the quality of the teaching,
research, learning environment, and the student
experience—you see that IT really
enables all these things. So our goal is not
necessarily to become the best in IT; it’s to
be the best in IT enablement, because that
will help us to be the best and achieve national
prominence in those areas that are associated
with the broad role of our university.

After all, universities do two things: they
create new knowledge, and they share information.
And in the 21st century, IT is critical
to both of those things. And that’s why I get
so anxious about this current turn of events,
because I have a feeling that if we don’t
address this challenge to our focus, we’re
going to lose our capability to do these
other interesting and critical things. And not
only will a given, particular institution suffer, but the nation
will suffer as well. Moreover, higher ed will suffer. If you
don’t have advanced research, advanced computation, and
advanced learning environments that are developed locally,
regionally, nationally, and globally to take advantage of the
fact that this is a very interconnected world, and if instead
what you’re doing is only managing your institution as a
business, and protecting yourself from that globally connected
world, I fear it’s going to slow the advance of the
US in the world’s future.